Along with the brand-new Play boosters,Magic: The Gathering’sMurders at Karlov Manor will be debuting a new version of the bundle box, with more packs and extra goodies than before.
In 2021, with the launch of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, bundles swapped from offering ten Draft booster packs, to instead having eight Set packs instead. While this did include more rares, the change means bundles could no longer be used as a cheap way to play limited games, and included fewer cards total.
Magic: The Gathering – Murders At Karlov Manor Bundle
Track down a dangerous serial killer on the streets of Ravnica in Magic: The Gathering’s Murders At Karlov Manor. Full of puzzles, clues, and suspects, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen of Ravnica before.
Fortunately, with Murders at Karlov Manor, bundles are once again getting an overhaul to fit the new Play boosters. In it, you’ll get nine Play boosters of the set. You’ll get fewer basic lands, but ten of them will be the full-art treatment found within booster packs, something bundles previously haven’t offered.
In total, you’ll be getting 20 more cards than in the previous bundles. 30 more in the booster packs, offset by the ten fewer lands. You’ll also get all the stuff that came in the previous bundles, like a Spindown counter, an exclusive alt-art promo card, and a storage box.
Play boosters are being rolled out with Murders at Karlov Manoras a replacement for Draft and Set boosters. Designed to balance the limited play of a Draft booster with the alternate art treatments and greater number of rares that made a Set booster so much fun to open, they include 14 cards – two more than a Set booster, but one fewer than a Draft.
Though the announcement of Play boosters was mostly well-received, it did get some criticism for driving the price of Magic’s cheapest offering up, as, despite replacing Draft boosters, they will be following the pricing of the slightly more expensive Set boosters. It’s expected this will have a knock-on effect for things like prerelease events and, as is the case here, bundles.
The last time we’ll be seeing Draft boosters is in next January’s Ravnica Remastered.
Wizards of the Coast infamously doesn’t provide an MSRP for Magic: The Gathering products, but other recent sets like The Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Wilds of Eldraine have fallen between $30 and $45. This means Murders at Karlov Manor and its preorder price of $50 is a minor price rise, roughly equivalent to the cost of one Play booster. Whether these are worth it to you or not depends almost entirely on how much you care about the fewer basic lands bundled in.
Murders at Karlov Manor will be taking us back to Ravnica, to solve a string of murders on its busy streets. Full of Detectives, clues, and even a crossover with Hasbro’s own Cluedo coming a few weeks later that includes full-art shocklands, it’s a set that’s poised to put ze little grey cells to work when it launches on July 11, 2025.
